Month: December 1991

My twenty first assignment for Alfred Hitchcock. Probably the one I was the most pleased with in these first several years of working for this magazine (if I’d been a bit more diligent about research into how actual snake scales look, this could’ve been even better). Thanks to Bruce Harris of New Jersey, who was kind enough to share several of these early illustrations with me (a lot of the early artwork has been lost).

These are a couple more illustrations for the Worldwide Church of God’s ‘Youth 91’ magazine. Both rather strange in concept, and I’m surprised to see so many of these early cartoon illustrations utilizing words and word balloons in various ways. I couldn’t find the exact date of either of these drawings, but judging from the style and technique, I’d say that the one above was probably sometime in 1990 and the one below was probably in ’91 (the characters seem a bit cruder looking in the above example – the emphasis on big scary looking teeth which I eventually abandoned). Another anthropological indicator that I’m noticing in the evolution of my ‘cartoon people’, they all seem to lack any sort of hearing apparatus, and over time these develop into tiny ‘buds’, and then eventually grow into full fledged ‘ears’.

After doing a few book projects for Eerdmans Publishing, a local firm, I was also asked to provide a few ‘sample’ illustrations for a couple other projects that never got off the ground (at least with me drawing them). The above illustration was for a ‘boyhood life of Jesus’ book, which was one of these ‘sample’ pieces.

Another new magazine client in December, Institutional Investor, for which I did a full page scratchboard illustration (unfortunately the art has long since disappeared).

Me and my wife hosted an xmas party from approximately 1984 to 1995. For the years prior to my illustration career, the invitation was my big annual chance to let my creative juices flow, and in the years after I started drawing full time, they became a nice break from the routine assignments. This would have been our 7th annual party, and I had previously thought all these invites were lost to the sands of time, until I discovered a stash of them in my father’s keepsake drawer when he passed away in 2014. This was the first year we held it at our new house on Briggs Blvd, when Keenan was about 2 years old.